Saturday, 13 June 2015

Day 2: Onward

They say the first 2000 light years are the hardest. I wouldn't know, they just seemed to fly past.

A group of ships flying through the same system can do a lot to keep each other company. The comms are crystal clear, the humour is sharp, and the camaraderie is strong.

Settling into the routine of jumping and scanning needs an alertness and awareness of your surroundings though, and there's no room for complacency.

Jumping and scanning.

Scans have shown something interesting and, dropping into orbit, a blue water world without any land masses or clouds to speak of, fills the viewport ahead. A droplet suspended in space and seemingly forever orbiting a bright star that it can never extinguish.

Jumping and scanning.

A cold and cloudy earth-like planet sitting in the goldilocks zone around this M-class star. Too much atmospheric pressure to be comfortable perhaps, and not enough air for a stroll.

Jumping and scanning.

A huge star hurtles into view and off to one side, and clearly not my destination in this binary system. The witch space exit vector scrapes by the stars corona and the ship temperature rises sharply.

Holy crap! That was close. The adrenaline surge has brought me back to full alertness. Tight binary systems have been the curse of many a starship pilot, and the death of several. They are rare but very very dangerous.

A few jumps on and the adrenaline has drained away, so moving to a safe distance and dropping to normal space I settle in for the night.

Disclaimer

The CMDR Charybdis blog was created using assets and imagery from Elite: Dangerous, with the permission of Frontier Developments plc, for non-commercial purposes. It is not endorsed by nor reflects the views or opinions of Frontier Developments and no employee of Frontier Developments was involved in the making of it.